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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32774 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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A follow up to the Roald Dahl censorship story from last week for those who haven't been following UK news. Apparently the publisher as (partially) backed down and agreed to keep the original books in print, along with the modernised versions. Apparently criticism from the Prime Minister, the queen, global authordom and the French was enough to swing it.

For now. But they've betrayed their intentions. They own the IP, this is what they want, and they'll bide their time until they get another chance, or they think nobody is watching. It's what other organizations have done.

How do you decide this is a case of what they always intended instead of drumming up controversy to get attention?

Companies don’t do that in my experience. You want controversy? Just get the CEO to say nigger or something. Controversy is the easiest thing to generate in the world and companies mostly seem terrified of it. Also I have never worked at a company where they said “Let’s do something that will piss off all our customers to generate controversy”

I disagree. Scott talked about this in his post on the IDW - you have to straddle the line carefully, not just go into being seen as outright wrong or immoral. This book change seems nearly perfectly tailored to generate free publicity for Roald Dahl books - you have plenty of people who will take either side of the most obvious and common arguments: don't like don't read, rewriting historical books for modern audiences, making people more moral, etc.

You have to pick a side on an incendiary issue that directly relates to the thing at hand. A CEO saying "nigger" or something similar would make the controversy about the CEO, not the company, and people might very well decide they won't support that business at all even if the product is good.

That didn't go so well for Papa John.

Yes, that's his point.

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